Record Labels

Early in 2024, Clipse prepared to play a new album for their label, Def Jam. While these types of playbacks can be routine, this one was freighted with extra significance: The rap duo composed of brothers Pusha T and Malice had not released an album together since 2009.
Their comeback soon hit a speed bump. One song on the new album featured a guest verse from Kendrick Lamar, who spent part of 2024 in a venomous back-and-forth with Drake. And, as Pusha T recently told GQ, Lamar’s presence on the Clipse track made Def Jam’s parent company, Universal Music Group, uncomfortable. 

“They wanted me to ask Kendrick to censor his verse, which of course I was never doing,” Pusha T told the publication. “And then they wanted me to take the record off [the album].” 

Trending on Billboard

Clipse refused to make the requested changes, leading to the unravelling of Pusha T’s association with Def Jam — his label home for over a decade. Even though the rapper still owed Def Jam albums, he paid a seven-figure sum to get out of the deal, according to longtime manager Steven Victor. “If you’re an artist, your whole life is to create art and put it out,” Victor says. “If someone’s telling you that you can’t do that, or you have to do it within the confines of whatever box they put you in, that’s like creative jail.” (Reps for Universal Music and Def Jam did not respond to requests for comment.)

Pusha T has his own antagonistic history with Drake, which culminated in the scathing 2018 diss record “The Story of Adidon”; Victor says Pusha T’s verses have been facing strict label scrutiny ever since. Meanwhile, the fallout from Lamar’s battle with Drake is still ongoing: The latter has sued Universal Music Group, accusing the company of defamation over Lamar’s track “Not Like Us.”

Victor spoke with Billboard about the end of Pusha T’s relationship with Def Jam, and finding a new home for the rapper — and the Clipse album — at Roc Nation. 

When you started to hear objections to the Lamar verse on the Clipse album, where were they coming from?

UMG has this department where they review lyrics. So it was that department. The real reason [that department] is there is to protect the artists and the label from lawsuits for copyright infringement. They do it for all the labels. Some labels adhere to it closer than others.

Let’s say you interpolate somebody else’s song. [That department] is there to make sure that the song is properly cleared. It’s not meant to be like, “You said XYZ about XYZ artist, so we’re not going to release this music.” 

While you’ve been working with Pusha, have you ever had challenges with that department before?

In the beginning, no. But starting in 2018, yeah.

That’s the year Pusha released “The Story of Adidon.” He put that on SoundCloud, and it’s never been officially released on streaming services. Was that a way of getting around any internal objections?

Part of the reason, yeah, to avoid that. [Also] we never actually properly cleared it. 

Pusha T mentioned two songs in his interview with GQ, Rick Ross’ “Maybach Music VI” and Pop Smoke’s “Paranoia,” where his verses were ultimately cut. Was that because of the same department’s scrutiny?

Yes. What happened on the Pop Smoke song is that UMG thought that he was dissing Drake on that song. He wasn’t, but they thought he was. Pop Smoke was released on my label [Victor Victor], and obviously I managed Pusha. So they came to me and said, “We’re not going to put this out now, unless you get Pusha to change these lyrics.” Even though it has nothing to do with Pop Smoke, they’re like, “Either he changes these lyrics, or we’re not putting the album out.” 

What happened to freedom of speech? First of all, he’s not dissing Drake. But how do you get to tell him to just change his lyrics or you’re not putting this album out?

From what Pusha told GQ, this Kendrick verse they’re concerned about on the new record is not dissing Drake, either.

Yeah, I don’t know what their concern is. But they were like, “There’s a line here; we think it’s controversial; [Kendrick] needs to change it, or we’re not putting it out.” We’re not going to ask him to change the verse. You guys are wrong. Stop looking at this this way. None of this makes any sense.

It got to the point where the conversation became, “You can’t keep stopping this guy from being able to put out his art.” He’s a rapper. Every time he puts out an album or a song, you can’t listen to it to make sure that he’s not dissing somebody before you put it out. He has to think about what he’s saying before he’s saying it in the hopes that you might not think that he’s saying the wrong thing? Who could live their life like that?

I went to them and I said, “Let us put the song out somewhere else since you guys have an issue with it. You guys won’t have to stand behind whatever complications come from it. We’ll put the song out somewhere else, and we’ll license it back to you guys when the album comes out.” Their response was, “How about you just find somewhere else to put out Clipse? Just pay something to us and put it out somewhere else.” 

My thing was, we can’t do that — Pusha and the Clipse are one thing. [At this point], he clearly doesn’t trust you guys. You guys haven’t been good stewards of his career. 

So they said, “Find another deal, and let’s figure out a business.” They didn’t drop us. They were like, “Pay us this money” — which was an exorbitant amount of money, a s—t ton of money — “and we’ll let you out the deal.” That’s what happened. We paid them the money, an insane amount of money. It wasn’t, like, $200,000. It was a lot of money for an artist to come up with. They bought themselves out of the deal.

How many solo albums did Pusha have left on his deal with Def Jam? 

I don’t really want to talk about that part. He had like three albums left. 

So you had to pay seven figures to get out of the deal?

Yeah. 

How quickly were you able to get another deal in place?

It happened simultaneously [with getting out of the previous deal]. It took a couple of weeks for us to figure out the paperwork. Again, it was a lot of money — we kept on going back and saying, “Can we pay you this amount of money and a part of the profit? Can we figure out a deal where we pay you as the guys make money from the new release, instead of coming up with this large sum of money [right now]?” They said no. They were like, “We want our money, and we want some of the profits.” 

Once I knew that we had, in principle, a deal in place with Def Jam [to leave], I got on the phone with Jay-Z. I was like, “Look, this is what’s happening. We’ve been talking about doing X, Y, Z, together. There’s an opportunity here to do this album. What do you think?” 

He hit me back right away, like, “You just made my day. Let’s figure it out. What do we need to get it done?” I went back to Pusha, and said, “Listen, Jay’s gonna give us a very artist-friendly deal, we get to own the masters, and they’ll put the marketing power of Roc Nation behind it. You guys are friends. It’s a great outcome.” We worked out the deal in less than 24 hours. 

You had to pay Def Jam a lump sum to get out and also give a cut of what you make off the new record?

Yeah, we had to give them a cut also, which is insane. But the good thing about it is that Pusha is in control of his future. Now he has three deals in three different places. At the beginning of his solo career, we put out records independently with Mass Appeal; he owns those records. Then we did the deal with G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam; when Kanye left Def Jam, we worked out an agreement with him where he gave Pusha his masters back on the G.O.O.D. Music side. And now we did this deal with Jay. 

Pusha is having way more success creatively, financially and professionally, than he did at the peak of his career, which was when [Clipse’s] “Grindin’” came out. Smart and steady wins the race. 

What appeals to you about taking the independent route?

I still think there’s a place for major record labels. But if you can get away with being at a place that understands the culture that you’re in a lot more, moves more nimbly, and you can get the same resources that you would from a major, why would you go to a major, especially with the way the deals are structured? 

You can get everything and more from somebody that not only looks like you, but behaves like you, has the same mindset as you. You’re not dealing with layers and layers of corporate bureaucracy and nonsense. And all artists are not treated equally in the major record label system.

One thing you still hear about the majors is that, to the extent that radio matters, they have the muscle there, and they also have an international presence that’s hard to replicate.

Cap. I call cap. I’ve done it on a smaller scale and on the larger scale. All you need is a team. You can hire and you can outsource a great international team, a great radio team. For some artists it’s definitely more beneficial to be part of a major record label. But you don’t need to be on a major record label to find success. 

Obviously Pusha T and Def Jam had a long relationship. Is it tough to see it end this way?

Pusha has been signed to Def Jam for almost 15 years. We’ve been there for a long time; we’ve seen different regimes come and go. But at the end of the day, if a relationship is not working, for whatever reason, it doesn’t make any sense to stay there, regardless of how much you might like it or might feel comfortable. And I don’t know if the amount of attention, focus and detail that we were looking for [on this album rollout] would have happened there anyway. 

Is this the start of a potentially closer relationship between Victor Victor and Roc Nation?

I’d say so. There’s a lot going on, a lot of moving parts. But the focus right now is definitely this Clipse album.